Just a few years ago, cloud based communications were great for early adopters, those who are prepared for a few hiccups - but lots of jitter, shock, and dropped calls made it really difficult to talk everyday people and businesses into trusting the cloud. Clark Peterson, board member of Cloud Communication Alliance, recalls, “we were we were out there trying to convince people, why would you ever trust anybody that brand you haven't heard?”

What has Changed?

It has been a decade, and the over the top services that support cloud products has improved greatly, both in terms of capacity and accessibility. The improvement from 2007 to 2017 has been astounding - from 3.67 Mbps to 18.75 Mbps. This, alone, has been huge.

Also, the normalization of the Internet of Things has driven acceptance by the mainstream. When your refrigerator has a web browser, and you can connect cameras in your home that you can watch from anywhere on your smartphone, the notion of cloud communications becomes easier to accept.

But for businesses, it has finally started to make sense. Even the blue chip on-premise providers are shifting. Clark talks about “this thing in the cloud compared to the Avaya and the Ciscos and the Mitels. And, you know, these huge brands who they all knew very well. And now you look at all those big brands have all made moves to the cloud. They're all made big acquisitions to get to the cloud. And now they're there.”

What about the Future?

“I think in 2020, you see a lot of moving up market. A lot of providers trying to position themselves to be players as this goes up market.” Not only will we see providers shifting their focus, says Clark, but we can also look toward integration. “I think you also see a lot of integration happening with CRM. All those platforms start to converge and really be a common cloud communications platform to get people to create the solution they want.”

Opportunities Abound

Clark is optimistic, “the Gartner's forecasts that they gave us is actually surprising to me how aggressive it was in that they said 74 percent of the companies who haven't yet moved to the cloud are going to do so in the next two years.” There are billions of dollars of opportunity out there for cloud communications.